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I am trying to create a simple game using pygame on google collab, but on executing the code pygame.display.set_mode() I get the error No available video device. So how do I resolve it?

1 Answers1

13

You can suppress pygame's attempt to use a real display device by telling SDL to use a dummy driver like:

!pip install pygame 

import os
os.environ['SDL_VIDEODRIVER']='dummy'
import pygame
pygame.display.set_mode((640,480))

which for me emits:

Collecting pygame
  Downloading https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/b3/5e/fb7c85304ad1fd52008fd25fce97a7f59e6147ae97378afc86cf0f5d9146/pygame-1.9.4-cp36-cp36m-manylinux1_x86_64.whl (12.1MB)
    100% |████████████████████████████████| 12.1MB 1.9MB/s 
Installing collected packages: pygame
Successfully installed pygame-1.9.4
pygame 1.9.4
Hello from the pygame community. https://www.pygame.org/contribute.html
<Surface(640x480x8 SW)>

(obvs., this won't use the GPU for the dummy "display"; I'm assuming you only want to use the colab GPU for AI/ML)

Ami F
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